Thursday, 26 June 2008

Every company I have worked in has had their own coding guidance and styling and where non existed I was involved in the creation of one. Having guidance on how code will be created and styled is very important as it reduces the time it take for each developer to move from task to task especially when many developers are maintaining the same class.

The only issue with code guidance and styling it is hard to enforce, especially in smaller teams with very limited resources, what is needed is an application which could enforce the chosen styling.

In comes StyleCop and NArrange;

StyleCop

Microsoft Source Analysis a.k.a StyleCop is another one of Microsoft's internal tools released to the public, it uses a number of predefined rules which outline how the code should be styled.

When you include this tool as part of your build process it raises error or warnings informing you how your code fails the predefined rules.

As you can expect from Microsoft this tool is very good however been warned there are many rules and some of them very different from the public guidance that Microsoft gives! This tool will only work on C# code, because Microsoft believe the VB.NET does enough self formatting.

A new version is already in development which will include the ability to easily create new rules and automatically format code.

NArrange is not a Microsoft product but is the community effort to create a similar tool. This tool is very much like StyleCop and will tell you how your code does not meet predefined styles and guidance however this tool will reformat your code to meet the styling and will do all this for C# and VB.NET.

Currently NArrange is only in Beta but the team are regularly releasing versions and they are on version 0.2.4.

Thursday, 12 June 2008

A number of new tutorials have appeared on the ASP.net site covering the AJAX control toolkit, some of these are very similar to the previous video examples but these are different as you have to read the instructions.

I know its a strange concept, having to read the tutorials (with video everywhere), however it does mean that you can quickly scan the text and pick out the information you need alot quicker and each tutorials comes with an online demo of the final result.

Tuesday, 10 June 2008

I am sure by now you have heard that there is going to be a service pack for Visual Studio 2008, as history dictates a service pack for a Microsoft product includes hot-fixes and completion of work that did not make it into the original release, and this service pack is no different.

Do not get me wrong I am not against service packs, I quite like them, its like getting an enhancement of the product you like for free, and the service back for Visual Studio does have some nice enhancements. These include;

Built in URL rewriting engine (although this is needed for the MVC framework but can be used by all)

Monday, 9 June 2008

Security is something we all need to make sure is at the front of our minds when developing any software, when using new technologies it can become hard to know where to implement the security and how to do so.

However there is always help at hand and the Patterns & Practices team are there first with their snappy titled document "Improving Web Services Security: Scenarios and Implementation Guidance for WCF". This document, which exist on CodePlex in beta form, contains alot of information about how to implement security for your WCF Services and is another resource to add to your arsenal (do bare in mind it is in BETA form so is destine for change and update)

Tuesday, 3 June 2008

50 new Silverlight 2 beta 1 screencasts have been created to cover all aspects of Silverlight development including sockets, cross-domain requests and multi-threading to mention a few. The videos have been created by some of the UK evangelists, Mike Taulty and Mike Ormand (due to be in Bristol on 17th June).

Most of the presentations are around two minutes in length so you can get a short sharp injection of each topic.